This is the tale that began in 2006 in my first year of beekeeping in Atlanta, GA. ...there's still so much to learn.

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I've been keeping this blog for all of my beekeeping years and I began my 12th year of beekeeping in April 2017. Now there are almost 1300posts on this blog. Please use the search bar below to search the blog for other posts on a subject in which you are interested. You can also click on the "label" at the end of a post and all posts with that label will show up. At the very bottom of this page is a list of all the labels I've used.

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I began this blog to chronicle my beekeeping experiences. I have read lots of beekeeping books, but nothing takes the place of either hands-on experience with an experienced beekeeper or good pictures of the process. I want people to have a clearer picture of what to expect in their beekeeping so I post pictures and write about my beekeeping saga here. Along the way, I've passed a number of certification levels and am now a Master Beekeeper Enjoy with me as I learn and grow as a beekeeper.

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Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Jennifer Berry's Views on Natural Beekeeping

In August, Jennifer Berry spoke to our bee club on the topic of Natural Beekeeping. I had a hard time with her talk and didn't post about it, but I wanted to now before I get distracted with other things.

Jennifer Berry is Keith Delaplane's right hand person and a very good beekeeper with tons of scientific knowledge. I think Jennifer Berry is so entertaining - she could be a stand-up comic quite successfully and so she's really fun to listen to, but this talk had me ready to jump out of my chair.

I should also say that when I was in college centuries ago one of my favorite courses (I was a philosophy major) was logic. I loved logical reasoning and fallacies and really found it interesting to solve logic problems - my logic textbook was the only college text that I kept after college.

So when Jennifer started with a fallacy of logic, I had a difficult time. The fallacy is called the straw man fallacy.

"Explanation

A straw man argument is one that misrepresents a position in order to make it appear weaker than it actually is, refutes this misrepresentation of the position, and then concludes that the real position has been refuted. This, of course, is a fallacy, because the position that has been claimed to be refuted is different to that which has actually been refuted; the real target of the argument is untouched by it."

What Jennifer said was that we don't keep bees naturally, do we? After all, bees live in trees, not in boxes; bees get to choose where they live, but we choose where our bees live; bees in nature requeen when they need to, but we decide when to requeen and give them a queen that is not their own; wax foundation is not natural, bees are not native to the United States so even having them here is not natural, etc.

All of this was to prove that we don't keep bees naturally so practicing natural beekeeping is not possible. This is the straw man fallacy because while all of those things may be true, none of them have anything to do with whether you use treatment or not in your beehives. They are not related.

Proving that we don't start out with a natural situation does not mean that you therefore can't succeed at keeping bees without treatment.

She followed this by encouraging people first: not to believe everything you read on the Internet - probably a good piece of advice - and second: to know what you are wanting when you purchase a queen. Are you looking for a queen with hygienic behavior? Are you wanting a queen who produces good winter bees? What are you looking for in a queen? Ask the breeder what he/she looks for in a queen that he/she produces.

Those two pieces of information were valuable and helpful to all beekeepers.

She went on to talk about the use of IPM, including screened bottom boards, freezing drone brood, all the usual suspects, ending with using chemicals, but she had lost me by then because I was so upset by her message to our many new beekeepers in the club that they can't keep bees naturally because, well, it just isn't possible since we don't start out in a natural way.

11 comments:

What is natural beekeeping? Treatment free beekeeping seems to be better defined, I think. You say she had a strawman argument, but you haven't defined what natural beekeeping is at least not on this page. Is it just treatment free?

You are right that I didn't define natural beekeeping because I didn't write down what she said as her definition - not sure she did say. The assumption from the way her talk went was that by natural beekeeping she meant what you and I would call treatment free beekeeping. Thanks for the input.

Treatment Free beekeeping appears to include methods for controling mites like small cell, brood breaks, drone brood culling, and sugar dusting (maybe?). That doesn't sound very natural to me (although maybe more natural than using chemicals). So my argument is that the term Treatment Free is the appropriate term which is a management system that does not include chemical treatments. Natural beekeeping seems much more passive almost neglectful depending on your perspective. BTW, I'm glad you are back writting on the blog!

These practices are not natural to me either. Drone brood culling is the worst of them all. If you observe the acidic way of beekeeping in other countries, you will notice they recommend the drone culling in spring, summer and autumn. Why? Because all those acids are not enough effective in the treatment of Varroa and varroatosis. We all should kill our drones they say. And they find readiness to do it among some loud people. It is not normal or natural.

Thanks, Max - I had a very over-committed September - never again. I have stopped my teaching job at Emory which I've done for 16 years and gotten off of two time-consuming committees that were suffocating me, so I'm back on the blog. I like the term treatment free much better but reported here on natural beekeeping because that was the title of Jennifer's talk.

Linda, I agree that the difficulty here was with terminology (although I am perplexed as to why your lecturer would entitle her talk such that she moves off onto a completely different topic immediately...). We keep bees as cattle are kept; managed, cared for, manipulated. But as with rearing organic (another fuzzy term) beef, we want a pristine product. Instead of hormone and chemical free meat, we want wax and honey as the bees make it, and healthy bees. I am unhappy with miticides as they are hard on the bees and beekeeper, persist in the honey and wax, and worst of all aggressively drive adaptation in the mites. We had a very unpleasant moment in our club recently when a commercial pollinator stated flat out that "treatment free" is not a commercially viable way to raise bees. The treatment free proponents of the club were outraged. Which is to say, different ends (at least at this point in time) dictate different practices. The commercial beekeepers do not want to lose access to miticides. But the rest of us are trying to find a way forward without them. If we can, perhaps someday we can offer the commercial beekeepers commercially viable way to raise bees treatment free. I too am delighted to have you back Linda! I look forward to your lucid and thought provoking posts.

We all know alot of folks in the Natural Beekepping Community, I guess you would call it are at odds with Jennifer because she does not buy the small cell theroy. Terminology was this issue hee but Linda did you have an open mind on the issue... just curious?

I did have an open mind - as a matter of fact I went enthusiastically to the lecture because I really enjoy and have learned a lot from Jennifer. I found it discouraging for her to say because we aren't practicing 'natural beekeeping" from the beginning, then essentially there was no point in trying to keep things closer to nature. I don't know what I think about small cell. I do value and appreciate bees being raised foundationless so they can make their own needs via cell size. Jennifer does this too - she puts her bees on foundationless frames with popsicle stick starters.

Jennifer Berry published a ridiculously flawed piece of research a few years ago about small cell foundation not working versus varroa mites. In my opinion she has no business speaking about honeybees and its unfortunate that her opinion carries any weight at all. It should NOT

I think that everyone is stuck on the phrase "Natural Beekeeping." I did not think Jennefer point was to affend the treatment free beekeepers present. Jennifer started by pointing out that we keep bees in artificial cavities at a highter density than they occur in nature in areas where there is inadequate forrage quanity and quality. We put chemicals in the hive when we use comercial foundation. We have exposed them to parasites and diseases for which they are not the natural host. We harvest their honey. None of these IS "Natural," but many of these are common practices for most of us even those who are "natural" beekeepers. Because of these realities (some of which we can alter by not using old comercial foundation,) if we expect that we can just put bees in a box, never practice IPM, harvest honey and never feed, never select for resistant genetics we will end up having to replace out bees every year. This could result in selective presures for stronger stock IF you are left with several serviving hives from which to propagate and replace losses. Most small scale or hobby beekeepers do not have enough hives to do this and end up starting over every year by purchasing bees from anywhere they can get them. She then sugested that we be selective about where we get our bees from in hope that the bees we choose will have been bred to fulfil our expectations. Jennifer's talk was not to discourage people from trying to keep bees in as natural a state as they can, but not to live under the illusion that with all the chalenges our bees face, they may not thrive without our help.

A HUGE thank you to the person who posted the previous reply. It's the most succinct and logical explanation i've read on this issue. The points in this reply are ones i can wrap my head around and integrate into my own personal explanation of "natural beekeeping" - if indeed it exists when humans are involved. Thanks again...

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